The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel

by Frank Belknap Long

Then began the struggle which had almost robbed Corriston of his life, the cruel, one-sided, impossible-to-win struggle in total darkness.

  And Corriston had won it.

  * * * *

  Now almost in disbelief, Corriston looked down at the knife he had taken from the loser, telling himself that it was impossible that so much could have happened in so short a time and that he could still be alive at the end of it.

  The wound in his shoulder was no longer painless, but it had ceased to bleed profusely, and his exploring fingers convinced him that the knife had severed no more than a superficial ligament. He strained his ears in the sudden quiet, listening for a possible return of his adversary. He did not think that the defeated man would attempt a second attack. But there was no telling what he might or might not do. Probably he’d ascended the companionway by now and was mingling with the other passengers.

  The final link in Corriston’s search had snapped. Even while battling for his life, he had felt close to the vanished girl. The man who had killed Clakey had been at least a link, a link that, short of Corriston’s total defeat, might have been seized upon with physical violence and made to yield up its secret.

  Now Corriston found himself wondering if the defeated man had been telling the truth. Had the link been non-existent from the first? Was the killer as completely in the dark as he was as to the whereabouts of Ramsey’s daughter?

  It was difficult to believe that the man had been lying. Despite his hatred and denials he had offered Corriston a deal: “Tell me where the girl is and I may not kill you.” The deal part had been a lie, of course. He would have gone on and attempted to kill Corriston anyway. But his plea for information, that tentative, cunning feeler in the dark had seemed genuine.

  What had been the man’s purpose in killing Clakey? Why had Clakey been murdered in the general passenger cabin, in plain view of the other passengers? Because the killer had seen the girl go into the lounge and thought she was still there? And because he wanted free and instant access to her, with Clakey out of the way? It was the only answer that made sense.

  The killer must have known that Clakey was in Ramsey’s employ and had been guarding Ramsey’s daughter. Why then had he been unable to take advantage of his crime in any way? Apparently neither he nor a possible confederate had succeeded in what almost certainly had been a pattern of violence directed at Ramsey through his daughter—a plan obviously worked out in advance, ready to be put into operation the instant a promising opportunity presented itself.

  Into Corriston’s mind flashed an ugly picture of the girl pinioned by strong arms and with a handkerchief pressed to her face. She had ceased to struggle and was being spirited quickly away. The picture became even more intolerable when he saw her held captive in a cabin difficult to locate, at the mercy of men without compassion.

  But for some reason he’d never cease to be thankful for, it hadn’t happened that way. Something had gone wrong with the plan, and the killer didn’t even know when and why and how she had vanished. Sharing Corriston’s frustration, he had been struggling simply to save himself, to keep Corriston from identifying and exposing him. The fury he’d displayed was not difficult to understand.

  Corriston found himself becoming more confident again, less dominated by despair. The change in his mood surprised him but he seized upon it gratefully and started building on it. There was only one logical next move. He must find the captain quickly and enlist his help. He must take the master of the ship fully into his confidence. With every gift of persuasion at his command, he must make the captain see how the danger of Ramsey’s daughter was mounting and would continue to mount with every minute that she remained unfound.

  He still felt dizzy, and his head was aching a little, but he moved quickly through the darkness, his faculties heightened by an intensity of purpose which enabled him to find the companionway without colliding with obstacles or taking a wrong turn. Up the stairway he climbed, still clutching the knife, prepared for a possible second encounter with its original owner.

  An attempt to regain the knife by trickery and stealth would not have surprised him. In fact, it was not at all difficult for him to picture a silent form flattened against the stair-rail, waiting for just the right moment to come hurtling toward him out of the darkness. For a moment, as he ascended, the strain became almost unendurable. Then the darkness dissolved above him, and he was advancing toward the captain’s cabin through the narrow passageway which he had spanned with his arms spread wide.

  He did not stop to span it this time. He emerged into the cabin and stood for an instant blinking in the sudden light. The cabin was still deserted. It was anybody’s guess where the captain had gone or when he would be returning, and Corriston decided not to wait. He walked to the door, opened it and stepped out into the general passenger cabin.

  No one saw him immediately. There were several passengers fairly close to him, but they were being attentive for the moment to the words and gestures of a tall, dignified looking man with observant brown eyes, a ruddy complexion, and gold braid on his shoulders. The tall man was Captain John Sanders.

  “I’d be a hypocrite and a liar if I said there was no justification for alarm,” Sanders was saying, in a voice loud enough to carry to where Corriston was standing. “Strict regulations prescribe that sort of thing. But it’s no way for a captain to keep the respect of his passengers.”

  Corriston felt himself stepping forward before he even thought about it. But he halted abruptly when the captain said: “There’s a murderer on the loose aboard this ship. You may as well accept that fact right now. Each of you has to be on his guard. It’s only right and proper that you should keep your eyes and ears open, and stay worried. If you do, our chances of catching up with him before the ship berths should be reasonably good.”

  The captain paused, then went on quickly: “We’ll get him eventually. You can be sure of that. He’ll never get past the inspection each of you will have to undergo when we reach the Station. But if we catch him before we reach the Station, you’ll be spared an investigative ordeal distinctly on the rugged side.”

  Corriston was suddenly aware that he was being stared at. Everyone was staring at him.

  “My God!” the Captain cried out, staring the hardest of all. “Where did you get that wound? Who attacked you? And what were you doing in my cabin?”

  Corriston walked up to the Captain and said in a voice that trembled a little. “May I talk to you privately, sir? What I have to say won’t take long.”

  “Why not?” Sanders demanded. “That uniform you’re wearing makes it mandatory. All right, come back into my cabin.”

  They went back into the cabin. The captain shut the door and turned to face Corriston with a shocked concern in his stare.

  “You’ve had it rough, Lieutenant. I can see that.”

  “Plenty rough,” Corriston conceded. “But it’s not myself I’m worried about.”

  “Did you know that a man has just been murdered?”

  “I know,” Corriston said.

  “With a poisoned barb. A Martian barb. It’s a plant found only on Mars. We have him stretched out on a table in the sick bay now. But he isn’t sick; he’s a corpse. Tell me something, Lieutenant, did you just tangle with the man who did it?”

  “I think so,” Corriston said. “In fact, I’d stake my commission on it.”

  “I see. Well, you’d better tell me about it. Tell me everything.”

  Corriston told him.

  The captain was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “But we’ve no Miss Ramsey on the passenger list. And I certainly didn’t invite her to drink a toast with me in my cabin. Are you sure of your facts, Lieutenant?”

  Corriston’s jaw fell open. He stared at the captain in stunned disbelief. “Of course I’m sure. Why should I lie to you?”

  “How should I know? It’s unfair to ask me that. I
f Ramsey’s daughter was on this ship, you can rest assured I’d have known about it. After all, Lieutenant—”

  “But she was on board and you didn’t know. Isn’t that obvious? Look, she was traveling incognito. The trip to the Station takes only five hours. Perhaps in so short a trip—”

  “No ‘perhaps’ about it. I’d have known.”

  “But she is on board, I tell you. I talked to her. I talked to Clakey. Don’t make me go over the whole thing again. We’ve got to find her. Ramsey’s enemies would stop at nothing. I’m afraid to think of what they might do to his daughter!”

  “Nothing will happen to his daughter. She’s on Earth right this minute in her father’s house, as safe as any girl that wealthy can ever be. Lieutenant, listen to me. I’ve got a great deal of respect for that uniform you’re wearing. Don’t make me lose it. When you come to me with a story like that—”

  “All right. You don’t believe me. Will you check the passenger list, just to be sure?”

  “I’ll do more than that, Lieutenant. I’ll assemble all of the passengers and check them off personally. I’ll give you an opportunity to look them over while I’m doing it. Later you can ask them as many questions as you wish. There’ll be a murderer among them, but that shouldn’t disturb you too much. You’ve already met. Perhaps you can identify him for us. Ask each of the men who made a non-existent Miss Ramsey disappear and the one who turns pale will be our man.”

  Suddenly the captain reddened. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant, I didn’t mean to be sarcastic. But a murder on my ship naturally upsets me. I’ll be completely frank with you. There’s a very remote possibility that Miss Ramsey actually is on board without my knowledge. She hasn’t had much publicity. I believe I’ve only seen one photograph of her, one taken several years ago. But you’ve got to remember that a captain is usually the first to get wind of such things. It comes to him by a kind of grapevine. She’s a golden girl—actually the goldenest golden girl on Earth.”

  4

  Now Corriston was in a steel-walled cell and the captain’s voice seemed only a far-off echo sympathizing with him.

  And it was an echo, for the captain was gone and he would probably never see him again. It was all very simple—that part of it—all very clear. The captain had faithfully kept his word. The captain hadn’t let him down. But any man can end up a prisoner when everyone disbelieves him and he has no way of proving that he is telling the truth.

  It was hard to believe that a day and a night had passed, and that the Captain had kept his word and gone ahead with the roll call. It was even harder to believe that he, Corriston, was no longer on the ship, but in a sanity cell on the Space Station, and that the ship was traveling back toward Earth.

  He shut his eyes, and the events of the past thirty hours unrolled before him with a nightmare clarity, and yet with all of the monstrous distortions which a nightmare must of necessity evoke.

  Darkness and time and space. And closer at hand the frowns of forthright, honest men appalled by mental abnormality in a new recruit, an officer with a steel-lock determination to keep the truth securely guarded and safe from all distortion.

  There had come the tap on his shoulder and a stern voice saying: “You’d better come with us, Lieutenant.” He had just told the captain the whole horrible story. He had not been believed.

  “Tell me about it,” said the recruit in the bunk opposite Corriston. “It will help you to talk. Remember, we’re not prisoners. We mustn’t think of ourselves as prisoners. We can go out and exercise. We can walk around the Station for a half-hour or so. We’ve only got to promise we’ll come back and lock ourselves in. They trust us. It could happen to anyone.

  “Space-shock. Not a fancy word at all. I’m getting over it; you’ve a certain distance to go. Or so they say. But we’re still in very much the same boat and talking always helps. Talk to me, Lieutenant, the way you did last night.”

  Corriston looked at the pale youth opposite him. He had close-cropped hair and friendly blue eyes, and he seemed a likeable enough lad. He was Corriston’s junior by several years. But there was an aura of neuroticism about him that made Corriston uneasy. But hell, why shouldn’t he get it off his chest. Talking just might help.

  “It’s true,” Corriston said. “Every word of it.”

  “I believe you, Lieutenant. But quite obviously they didn’t. Why not strike a compromise. Say I’m one-tenth wrong in believing you and they’re nine-tenths right in not believing you. That means there may be some little quirk in what happened to you that doesn’t quite fit into the normal pattern. Put that down to space-shock—a mild case of it. I’m not saying you have it, but you could have it.”

  The kid was grinning now, and Corriston had to like him.

  “Okay,” he said. “You can believe this or not. The captain lined all of the passengers up and checked them off by their cabin numbers. I didn’t see her. Do you understand? She just wasn’t there! I thought I recognized two of the women who had come out of the ladies’ lounge, but I couldn’t even be sure of that. One of the two denied ever having stepped inside the lounge, and the other was vague about it.”

  “I see.”

  “The captain really sailed into me for a moment, lost his temper completely. ‘A fine officer you are, Lieutenant. It’s painful to be on the same ship with the kind of officers the training schools turn out when the Station finds itself short of personnel. Is the Station planning to trust ships’ clearance to hallucinated personnel? All right, you talked to a girl—some girl. She didn’t even tell you she was Ramsey’s daughter; Clakey told you. And he’s dead. Not only is he dead, he wasn’t listed on the passenger list as Clakey at all. His name was Henry Ewers. I don’t know what you believed, Lieutenant. I don’t care what you think you saw. You tangled with someone and he stabbed you. He was real enough…obviously the man who killed Ewers. But you let him get away, so even that isn’t too much to your credit.’”

  “If I had been you,” the kid said, “I’ve had knocked him down.”

  “No.” For the first time Corriston smiled. “To tell you the truth, the captain is a good guy. He’s one of those blunt, moody, terribly human individuals you encounter occasionally, men who speak their minds on all occasions and are instantly sorry they did. You have to like them even when they seem to insult you.”

  “He made up for it then?”

  “I’ll say he did. He knew that when we landed the officials would be breathing right down my neck. He wanted to give me every chance. So he kept the officials away from me until I’d convinced myself Ramsey’s daughter just couldn’t be on board.

  “He let me look at every piece of luggage that was taken off the ship. He had some cargo to unload and he let me inspect that too, every crate. Most of the crates were too small to conceal a drugged and unconscious girl—or any girl for that matter. The ones that weren’t, he opened for me and let me look inside.

  “He let me watch every passenger leave the ship. Then, when all of the passengers had left, he stationed officers in the three main passageways and I went through the ship from bow to stern. I went into every stateroom and into every intership compartment. No one could have kept just a little ahead of me or behind me, dodging back into a compartment the instant I’d vacated it. They would have been instantly spotted by one of the officers.

  “The Captain wasn’t to blame at all for what happened later…when I tried to convince the commanding officers here that I was completely sane.”

  “I see. He must have really liked you.”

  “I guess he did. And I liked him.”

  The kid nodded. “And the murderer’s still at large. That makes it rough for the sixty odd passengers they’re holding in quarantine. How long do you think they’ll hold them in the Big Cage?”

  “As long as they can. They’ll keep them under close guard and increase their vigilance every time there’s a suspicious
move in the cage. They’ll be screened perhaps a dozen times. But most of them are influential people. Most of them have booked passage on the Mars’ run liner that’s due here next week. They can’t hold them forever. They’d start pulling wires on Earth by short wave and there’d be a legislative uproar.

  “Suppose they refuse to let them send messages?”

  “They won’t refuse. I’m sure of that.”

  The kid was thoughtful for a moment. Then he said: “Tell me more about Ramsey. Just what do you think is happening on Mars?”

  “No one knows exactly what is happening,” Corriston said. “But to the best of my knowledge the overall picture is pretty ugly. The original settlers have their backs to the wall with a vengeance. Now there are armed guards at their throats. Ramsey has taken over. He has resorted to legal trickery to freeze them out.

  “There are perhaps fifty important uranium claims on Mars and Ramsey has consolidated all of the holdings into a single major enterprise. To say that he’s cornered the market in uranium would be understating the case. He has taken possession by right of seizure, and the colonists can’t get to him. They’re living a hand-to-mouth existence while he lives in a heavily guarded stronghold behind three miles of electrified defenses.”

  The kid nodded again. “Yes, that’s the picture when you unscramble it, I guess. But most of it is kept hidden from the general run of tourists.”

  “Naturally. Ramsey has the power to keep it under wraps.”

  “Do you think the colonists had anything to do with Clakey’s murder and Miss Ramsey’s disappearance? Or I guess I should say Henry Ewers’ murder.”

  “Clakey, Ewers—his name doesn’t matter. I’m convinced that he was Miss Ramsey’s bodyguard.”

  “But you haven’t answered my question.”

  “I can’t answer it with any certainty. Did the colonists hire a killer and book passage for him on the ship? It’s difficult to believe that the kind of men who colonized Mars would resort to murder.”

  “But there are a few scoundrels in every large group of men. And what if they became so desperate they felt they had to fight fire with fire?”